In their book The Leadership Challenge (1987), Kouzes and Posner introduced a new way to think about leadership: as a set of skills and abilities that can learned by anyone at any level within an organization. The skills and abilities on which they focused were determined based on thousands of interviews with individuals, including those with and without leadership positions, at various ages, and living in numerous countries, about their “personal best” moments of leadership. This same method of interviewing about “personal best” moments was used when Kouzes and Posner developed The Student Leadership Challenge (2008); however, for this project, their interviewees consisted solely of student leaders. About these students, Kouzes and Posner said, “Though each student leader is a unique individual, there are shared patterns to the practice of good leadership. And these patterns can be learned” (p. 4). The five practices identified for student leaders, which are the same as those described in The Leadership Challenge, include model the way, inspire a shared vision, challenge the process, enable others to act, and encourage the heart. These practices together form a complete framework for how a student leader could behave and interact with others in order to perpetuate great accomplishments within an organization. Students who work to enact this framework understand that although they may be naturally stronger in some areas than others, there is a time when each of the five practices may be the most relevant. 

Although my understanding of the “teachability” of these practices originated with The Student Leadership Challenge (2008), it has been influenced greatly by my knowledge of student development theory and the personal stories of students as they endeavor to understand and conceptualize each of these strategies. For example, in the chapter focused on “model the way,” Kouzes and Posner wrote about the importance of aligning actions and values.  During a class spent discussing this topic, I read a variety of scenarios aloud and asked students to indicate on a Likert scale whether they felt the individual in the scenario behaved in a way that was congruent or incongruent with that character’s espoused values. Some students were very comfortable acknowledging the shades of grey evident in the scenarios and forming personal opinions. Others staunchly believed that the individual described had behaved in a way that was either extremely congruent or extremely incongruent with espoused values or looked to me for the “right” answer. From this and other similar experiences, I know that although Kouzes and Posner’s practices can be taught, that teaching must make sense for how ready developmentally students are for various kinds of conversations and meaning making. Students that Perry’s Theory of Intellectual and Ethical Development would describe as “dualistic” thinkers, participate and understand these concepts differently than those who have progressed further in their cognitive development (Evans, N. J., Forney, D. S., Guido, F. M., Patton, L. D., & Renn, K. A., 2010).

In future facilitation opportunities, my knowledge of the group with whom I am working combined with this body of experiential knowledge will help me to select developmentally appropriate activities. I suspect I will use the five practices with paraprofessional staff members or student leaders at a future institution. I also hope to someday teach a class which asks students to consider each of several leadership models or philosophies. Although I am generally familiar with concepts and activities associated with a variety of frameworks, I have significant room for growth.



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